Well, hello. And you're VERY welcome this week, to a column that has been called by some "not as bad as it was last week" - excellent! Actually, I was stunned, surprised and mightily shocked to see a list of the top 76 writers on the net carried on Lethal Wrestling - and see my name in there! I WAS THERE!

Sure the name wasn't spelled correctly, but it was me... and I was number 15. You hear that, Ma? I DO know what I'm doing, I'm NOT wasting my time and I CAN spell... whooo! A big thank you to everyone that voted for me in that poll!

Ahem. Well, anyway, I'm not going to dwell on the fact that I was listed higher than RAVEN - yes, RAVEN - any longer, so let's get into this week's column... which for no other reason than I feel like it, shall be a Random Thoughts column - yeah!

~~~

Shelton Benjamin... in the draft column last week, I said he was going to be a big time player, and the WWE seem to agree. He more than held his own in the match with Triple H, and pulling off the victory was the icing on the cake. The victory doesn't devalue Trips at all, but it does a hell of a lot for Shelton.

Of course, Trips will probably gain his wicked revenge somehow on this week's Raw, pretty much like he did with Jeff Hardy all those moons ago, but Benjamin still has a win over Trips under his belt, and more important than that, he showed a bit of charisma doing it, and proved that he can hang with the best of them.

Where he goes from this match will decide a lot of his future in the WWE. He needs to build on it, but not be shot to the top straightaway like Lesnar was. The WWE have Orton and Cena on the fast track to the top right now, Benjamin can develop at his own speed in the midcard and at Intercontinental level once Orton has moved beyond that.

~~~

Farewell Sean O'Haire, we knew ye well. O'Haire's release had been coming for a long time, if truth be told. For whatever reasons, the WWE was never really keen on him, which is a real shame. O'Haire was being groomed for the top by WCW, one of the few things that they were doing right in the build up to their demise, but they never had the time to let it play out as it should.

O'Haire was then bundled into the WWE quickly as part of the invading force, and once he broker out the Seanton Bomb on WWE television, that was pretty much it for his career. Various rumours spread that the locker room was upset that he used Jeff Hardy's move (I'd have been more upset that he did it BETTER than Hardy) or that he didn't say hello to Droz, or that he kept himself to himself... whatever. He was off TV for a while, in OVW learning his trade, doing what was asked of him, and then came The Gimmick.

The Gimmick was that O'Haire had shot these promos where he would argue against things and end them with "But I'm not telling you anything that you don't already know" - and it was doing great guns. He made a few appearances backstage on SD, convincing Spanky to streak through the arena, convincing Dawn Marie to flash the fans... the whole thing had great possibilities.

But then Piper arrived, and O'Haire was reduced to being a bodyguard, hanging around beside Piper and not doing much else. He had a good re-debut against Rikishi on PPV, and that was pretty much all she wrote for O'Haire. Piper got himself fired, so O'Haire had no place to be on TV. Since then, he's not been on Smackdown at all, had a few jobbing spots on Velocity, and was released this week.

Well, good luck to him, and I hope he makes it big elsewhere and comes back to haunt the WWE in the future. I'm still positive that O'Haire could have been a huge success given a decent push with the 'Devil's Advocate' style gimmick. Hopefully, we haven't seen the last of O'Haire.

~~~

Well done Spike Dudley! Good on the little guy, after all these years in the wrestling business, he FINALLY discovered the sun tan! Congratulations, Spike!

~~~

Bradshaw as a heel? Sorry, John 'Bradshaw' Layfield as a heel? I'm buying it. I think his gimmick is working fine for him... it's getting him heat by the ton, and he's actually got better skills on the mic than he gets credit for. We all know he's not the best worker in the WWE, so by keeping him out of the ring just now and letting promos and run-ins carry the feud, the WWE are booking this perfectly.

Eddie has proven in the past that he drag good matches out of passable wrestlers - if he can do the same with Bradshaw, then this might not be as bad a deal as is currently being made out by some sections of the Internet. Honestly, you'd think Bradshaw had killed someone by some of the comments about him!

No, he's not the first choice of guy I would have put in as an opponent for the WWE Title, but at least give it a chance before jumping all over it. It's a return to the old style of feud where (hopefully) people will get the PPV to see Bradshaw get his comeuppance from Eddie. Bradshaw is trying his best to make this work, and Eddie is always on top form, so let's see where this goes before declaring it WrestleCrap...

~~~

So... on that hopefully positive note... I bid you farewell for now.

Until then, have fun, go mad.

Thanks for reading - be sure and pay a visit to these two sweet sites :

WrestleHolic.com / TheGroovyComapany

Tony Cottam

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